Airport scanning not quite picture perfect

Frequent flyers could soon be able to bypass customs officers and have their identity checked by face-scanning machines, despite some doubts over their reliability.

The SmartGate facial recognition system was developed by the Australian Customs Service to speed up passenger processing without reducing security. It has been trialled for more than a year at Sydney Airport, where it was tested on Qantas crew.

In practice, passengers step into a kiosk and place their passport photograph face down on a scanner. Five simultaneous photos are taken of the person, then compared to that in the passport.

Gail Batman, an official with the service, said it was up to the Government to decide whether the system should be made available for use by the public.

It was declared a success after an assessment by independent overseas specialists, despite it letting through 1 per cent of imposters and rejecting 2 per cent of genuine passport holders.

The system's ability to detect imposters became an issue in early demonstrations when two Japanese businessmen were let through after swapping passports.

Ms Batman said the system was modified after that experience. "It was quite useful," she said.

One of two US experts who evaluated the system, Dr James Wayman, a security researcher at San Jose State University, denied there was an unacceptable risk.

"In one test 100 company employees attempted to impersonate someone other than themselves and eight of them were falsely accepted by the system. That is a very low rate of false accepts."

The system is the first in the world to use facial recognition for border control, though other overseas airports have trialled hand geometry and iris recognition.

Of the 4000 Qantas crew registered to use it, 98 per cent said they preferred the machine to a check by a customs officer.